Pack Animals

Took me a little while to see the connection... :)

Online I've found conflicting information on how much difference there is between cows and oxen.

We raise cattle, and in our area of the mid-south US an adult male is a bull, an adult female is a cow, a young female cow who has not given birth is a heifer, a young animal under one year of age is a calf, a young castrated male is a steer, and a castrated male four years of age or more is an ox. A veal is a calf fed mainly on milk (from either the mother or commercial formula) which gives the meat a lighter color, although some grain-fed young calves under 500 lbs. are butchered and called red veal. No idea if all this is officially correct or applies to other countries, but it's the accepted terminology in this agricultural region of the upper and mid-south US. (BTW, oxtails for sale in the store generally come from steers.)

That's not the way I know it. A castrated male is called a steer, period. An ox is any bovine animal that has been trained to pull or carry a load. (That, technically, can include buffalos and other bovines, as well as traditional cattle.) So: ox is a job title, not a gender, and can be bulls, cows, or steers. That said, most oxen are steers, because they are stronger than cows but more docile than bulls. (This comes straight from my ox-training friends in the rural Southwest.)

My friend also reminds me that the only reason a castrated male would be alive past one year is if he were to be trained as an ox, hence the confusion of the word. Typically, any animal you see described as an ox will be a castrated male past age one, but that is not actually because that is the definition of an ox.

^ yes, this is similar to some of the conflicting information I found. Also, apparently in some other languages there are similar terms that can apply across gender. Then I found some people saying there is genetic differentiation, too. Mysteries abound.

In my language the ox equivalent means just a castrated male, in context usually as pack animal but also as food.